Public, private and hybrid are the three flavors of cloud computing. As the market continues to mature, interest is growing in hybrid clouds by enterprises looking to get the best of both worlds.

According to the CIO Global Cloud Computing Adoption Survey (January 2012), hybrids are growing in popularity with nearly 20% of enterprise deployments using this model today. Hybrid clouds, which mix the benefits of private and public clouds, offer flexibility and choice of deployment methods without requiring trade-offs around performance, control and security.

While not ideal for many hedge funds today, it is still important to understand the concepts and benefits behind hybrid clouds as their applicability will continue to increase. Let’s take a look at what makes hybrid clouds appealing to some organizations:

Agility & Flexibility: A hybrid cloud model can allow a company to combine its own computing assets with assets from a public or private cloud provider to scale on-demand and increase agility. This model may be ideal for a company looking to handle bursts in workloads.

Potential Cost Savings: A hybrid cloud model, according to research from TrendMicro, has the ability to “optimize the infrastructure spending during different stages of the application lifecycle. Public clouds can be tapped for development and testing while private clouds can be used for production.”

“Painless” Application Migration: A hybrid model can allow companies to migrate applications to a cloud environment in a phased process where some components reside on the cloud, such as web and storage levels, while others remain on a dedicated physical infrastructure. Over time the application can be upgraded to run completely in the cloud environment.

Hybrid Cloud Use Scenarios

Some of the most common uses for hybrid clouds across the technology industry, according to a TrendMicro survey, include:

Using the private cloud for mission-critical applications and using public clouds for non-critical applications. A firm, for example, may use a private cloud for production deployment and a public cloud for test and development of lower-tier applications.

Another example is non-destructive Disaster Recovery (DR) testing. Organizations can test if their production environment is DR-ready by tapping the public clouds without any disruption.